The company made this decision, he said, because of "overwhelmingly customer feedback".

Early HTC smartphones did not sport locked bootloaders, but of late its handsets have, making the process of tinkering with the devcies' software rather harder - though not impossible.

At what point the re-appearance of unlocked bootloaders will appear isn't clear from Chou's statement. Most likely, as HTC ships new handset models, these will come with unlocked bootloaders. Current phones may get bootloader-unlocking updates.